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Show They Married Young in Days of Chivalry Modern opinion, which is happily in favor of falling in love and of adult marriage, is often shocked by the air of business which pervaded match-, making in the days of chivalry, and by the many cases of grown men married to little girls not yet out of their teens. For reasons of property,, or to settle family feuds, or simply to assure their own future, babies in cradles were sometimes betrothed and even married; mar-ried; all that the church .required was that children should be free when they came of age (at fourteen and twelve years old) to repudiate the contract If they so desired. Nothing seems to separate modern England from the good old days so plainly as the ease of little Grace de Saleby, four years old, who for the sake of her broad acres was married to a great noble, and on his death two years later, to another, and yet again, when she was eleven, to a third, who paid 300 marks down for her. There is an odd mixture of humor and pathos in the story of some of these marriages. John Rigmarden, three years old, was carried to church in the arms of a priest, who coaxed him to repeat the words of matrimony, but half way through the service the child declared that he would learn no more that day, and the priest answered, "You must speak a little more, and then go play you." James Ballard, ten years olfc, was married to Jane his wife "at X of thej clocke in the night without the con- sent of any of his friends, bie one Sir' Roger Blakey, then curate of Co'lne . . . . and the morowe after, the same James declarid vnto his Vnckle that the said Jane (beyinge a bigge damsell and manageable at the same tyme) had intised him with two Apples, Ap-ples, to go with her to Colne and to marry her." Elizabeth Bridge, nee Rambotham, says that after her marriage to John Bridge, when he was eleven and she thirteen, he never used her "lovinglie, Insomoche that the first night they were maried the said John would Eate no meate at supper, and when hit was bed tyme the said John did wepe to go home with, his father, he beynge at that tyme at her brother's house." From Medieval People, by Eileen Power. |
